literary canon

* = stuff i haven't personally read yet, or don't remember if I read as a kid

Beowulf
Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
Cervantes - Don Quixote*
Conrad - Heart of Darkness* (also watch Apocalypse Now)
Dazai - No Longer Human*
Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities*
Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dumas - The Man in the Iron Mask
Epic of Gilgamesh
Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Freud - Civilization and Its Discontents
Gardner - Grendel
Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
Hesse - Siddhartha
Hobbes - Leviathan
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Huxley - Brave New World
Joyce - Ulysses
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Machiavelli - The Prince
Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
Melville - Moby Dick
Mill - Utilitarianism
Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality
Orwell - 1984
Orwell - Animal Farm
Poe - collection of short stories
Shakespeare - pick a compilation of plays
Shelley - Frankenstein
Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
Stoker - Dracula (annotated version by Leonard Wolf if possible)
Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Thoreau - Civil Disobedience
Tocqueville - Democracy in America*
Twain - Huckleberry Finn*
Updike - Brazil*
Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
Williams (Tennessee) - pick a compilation of plays
Wodehouse - any Jeeves stuff

sci-fi
Adams - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Asimov - Foundation series
Banks - Culture series
Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar
Dick (Philip K.) - anything by him really
Heinlein - Starship Troopers
Herbert - Dune
Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
Sleator - Interstellar Pig
Stephenson - Snow Crash
Verne - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Verne - Around the World in Eighty Days

science
Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel*
Feynman (Richard) - pretty much anything
Gleick - Chaos: Making a New Science

history
Grimsley - And Keep Moving On: The Virginia Campaign, May-June 1864
Trudeau - Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May-June 1864

meh/don't bother:
Ayn Rand
Cooper - The Last of the Mohicans
Herodotus - The History
Tolstoy - War and Peace
Voltaire - Candide